A few things make a business as competitive as its capacity to remain relevant.  That is easy to disregard as many business managers tend to ignore disruptive factors.  Relevance in the marketplace can be achieved by many means.  Collaboration has emerged as an indispensable strategy to maintaining relevance because of its versatile capacity to enable innovation, leverage capabilities and reduce costs, among many other things.  It is now simply a mark of any competitive business to seek out collaboration with diverse business partners.  Some examples are included in the latest selection of recommended readings.   

Thanks to ROADMENDER readers who have suggested articles for this edition of Roadmender Recommends.

Collaboration the key to commercialising good ideas

Governments around the world recognise that the successful commercial deployment of cutting edge research and innovation is crucial to drive national growth, employment and economic development.  In Australia, the Turnbull Government has set the foundation of its policy approach to innovation through the National Innovation and Science Agenda report. The policy understands that the key to success is ensuring the regulatory environment effectively encourages robust and innovative research platforms and supports the commercialisation of resulting market…READ ON

Collaboration more important than competition

Founder of UTV Group, Ronnie Screwvala, today said working in a collaborative manner would be the feature.  “Competitiveness may be important, but 21st century is all about collaborative work. Teams and companies will come together. It will be rewarding to work collaboratively than competitively,” he said.  According to Screwvala, the capacity to learn from each other has grown exponentially and the 21st century will be less hierarchical and provide opportunities through collaborative efforts rather than competitiveness…READ ON

Collaboration Abounds: A World Of We Is Infiltrating Every Aspect Of Both Culture & Commerce

We see collaboration at work every time we hail an Uber, order Nobu delivery from Postmates or locally source a contractor from Handy. Since the 2008 meltdown when all trust was lost in big business and big government, the era of peer-to-peer trust and the need for collaboration and teamwork to drive innovation and disruption, has only continued to soar…READ ON

Hyundai looks to increase collaboration with Google

The self-driving car market is set to get very big, very fast, on the back of efforts by the likes of Ford, GM and other major car makers. Hyundai is not a company often included in the list of OEMs at the cutting edge of autonomous tech, and the South Korean company could use some friends to help it keep pace with the development of autonomous driving tech…READ ON

Collaboration is the key to a sustainable energy future

The federal chief sustainability Officer for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, on the world’s energy future.  Electric vehicles. Solar powered communities. Smart appliances. At one time these technologies sounded like something out of a futuristic movie, but today, these innovations are common in many of our homes and workplaces.  While they aren’t in every home, the costs associated with sustainable technologies continue to decrease and in very little time, these innovations will go from cutting edge to mainstream.  From generating your own power sources in your home, to having control over when your appliances consume the most energy, sustainable…READ ON

Chance Collaboration Yields an Advance in Cancer Treatment

A collaboration between an immunologist helping his stepmother fight cancer and the oncologist who treated her led to a discovery that could help many more patients benefit from a transformative new therapy.  A new class of drugs called checkpoint inhibitors works by releasing a molecular brake that stops the immune system from attacking tumors. So-called immunotherapy has been approved for several types of cancers and found to extend…READ ON

In This Week’s Best Business Books, The Heart-Head-Hand Approach to Cultivating Collaboration

In This Week’s Best Business Books, The Heart-Head-Hand Approach to Cultivating Collaboration.  Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.  The quantity of work still matters–but increasingly, quality matters more.  Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University, describes deep work as especially needed in cognitively demanding jobs that deliver high value and must be performed distraction-free. Deep work is required to master the kinds of complicated tasks that can’t be outsourced to a computer program.  And while quality trumps quantity, deep work actually produces a much higher level of output as practitioners hunker down for a few intense…READ ON

The Value of Client-Driven Collaboration (Perspective)

If expertise is the engine of growth for a law firm, then collaboration is certainly its accelerator. Vigorous collaboration ensures that people’s best ideas are brought forth, refined through constructive dialogue and put into action. This drives better thinking, greater client value and, thus, greater success for the firm and its people.  But, there’s a critical challenge: these vital ideas – the better answers – are dispersed, and need to be captured, because talent is segmented into practice areas and, in our case, from dozens of offices globally. Productive collaboration…READ ON